Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness--pushing us at intervals close to taboo and... dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one's consciousness, for death itself. Even on the level of simple physical sensation and mood, making love surely resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What one really wants is youth, and what one really loses is years. Life becomes at last a mere piece of acting. One goes on by ha...bit, playing more or less clumsily that one is still alive. It is ludicrous and at times humiliating, but there is a certain style in it which youth has not. We become all, more or less, gentlemen; we are ancien régime; we learn to smile while gout racks us.... We get out of bed in the morning all broken up, without nerves, color or temper, and by noon we are joking with young women about the play. One lives in constant company with diseased hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs; one shakes hands with certain death at closer embrace every day; one sees paralysis in every feature and feels it in every muscle; all one's functions relax their action day by day; and, what is worse, one's grasp on the interests of life relaxes with the physical relaxation; and, through it all, we improve; our manners acquire refinement; our sympathies grow wider; our youthful self-consciousness disappears; very ordinary men and women are found to have charm; our appreciations have weight; we should almost get to respect ourselves if we knew of anything human to respect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fear of failure is so great, it is no wonder that the desire to do right by one's children has led to a whole library of books... offering advice on how to raise them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To dine, drink champagne, raise a racket and make speeches about the people's consciousness, the people's conscience, freedom and ...so forth while servants in tails are scurrying around your table, just like serfs, and out in the severe cold on the street await coachmen--this is the same as lying to the holy spirit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of m...easuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As for the peasant populations of a great part of the world, they aren't so much anxious as hungry. They aren't anxious about whet...her they will get a salary raise, or which of the three colleges of their choice they will be admitted to, or whether to buy a Ford or Cadillac, or whether the kind of TV set they want is too expensive. They are hungry, cold and, in many parts of the world, they dread that local warfare, bandits, political coups may endanger their homes, their meager livelihoods and their lives. But surely they are not anxious. For anxiety, as we have come to use it to describe our characteristic state of mind, can be contrasted with the active fear of hunger, loss, violence and death. Anxiety is the appropriate emotion when the immediate personal terror--of a volcano, an arrow, the sorcerer's spell, a stab in the back and other calamities, all directed against one's self--disappears.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The attempt to be an ideal parent, that is, to behave correctly toward the child, to raise her correctly, not to give to little or... too much, is in essence an attempt to be the ideal child--well behaved and dutiful--of one's own parents. But as a result of these efforts the needs of the child go unnoticed. I cannot listen to my child with empathy if I am inwardly preoccupied with being a good mother; I cannot be open to what she is telling me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be... damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »